Greedy Goblin

Friday, March 26, 2010

What to gank now?

Blizzard closed the free transfer for hordies from Maghteridon-EU. The original goal of the ganking project was to make enough hordies transfer away. It seem that the fanboys followed their idol everywhere, causing Ensidia's new server to crash, making Ensidia to move again.

The server has now low population. The horde:alliance ratio is still somewhere 8:1, I made several "/who [class]" finding 49 (max) people on horde in every class, 5-10 in alliance. So we are still fighting against the odds, but our measurable goal went away.

We could set a similar new goal like "make the ratio 1:1", but by closing the free transfer, Blizzard expressed that they don't want more hordies to leave. If we gank them away, they will not tolerate it.

So new, measurable goal must be set that does not include direct griefing. My idea is (subject of discussion): to gain 100000 combined scalp number. Combined means every guild member's summary. "Scalp number" is "world honorable kill - world death * 20". Why would it be a good goal?

obviously measurable

a group goal that encourages cooperation

allows personal competition (I have more scalps than you) that motivate people to excel

does not support griefing (killing NPCs, lowbies or "honorless target"s is not rewarded)

has a scientific relevance, therefore worth doing

The last point needs explanation, why would our success say anything about "the people". Because the low absolute horde number means that we have to kill the same hordie many times. If we assume 2000 active lvl 71+ hordies, and the average gank group size 5 (everyone gets the HK) it means that the average hordie must be killed 100 times for our goal (100*5*2000) even if we die 0 times. So the average hordie will be motivated to do something against our ganking.

The point is that despite their 1:8+ ratio, they will fail to defend themselves from the ganking, exactly because 90% of them are M&S. The 10% will learn to evade us quickly by not going to the places we regularly gank, the 90% will just whine and die, they will neither learn to hide (morons) nor team up to fight back (slackers).

The point is to prove that a small group of dedicated non-M&S can smash a huge group of M&S.

Later, if we reach that goal (and obviously have a PvP geared group of 80-es) we can transfer to a server where horde can transfer away.

Note to not very bright people: if the /who gives 49 results it does not mean that there are 49 results. It means that /who reached its limit and there are 49 or more results available. You have to narrow your search for exact data.

27 comments:

Purplezorlak
said...

Well, it's a PVP server, so I do believe we can still gank anyone we want. Because of the observed horde behaviour, they gank and grief all the time, so there's no reason not to fight back and gank and grief just as they do.

i'm pretty sure Blizzard's response to pvp, camping, killing quest givers etc has always been "we will not intervene beacuse there is a pvp solution to the problem".

ie if a lvl 80 is ganking your lowbie then you are always free to ask for the help of a level 80 of your own faction to help.

it would be interesting to see if they stick to this policy in extreem cases. i have not seen any evidence either way.

assuming there would be some sort of warning given before any action if they disliked your behavior enough perhaps this could be your metric. keep escalating until you get your first official warning. it would be an interesting test for the whole community to watch.

this is coming from somone who got their first ever forums 24 hour ban this week. i persoanlly didnt think it was so bad but i'll pull my head in.

The trouble I see for you guys is boredom. It's actually kinda dull to fly around, looking for a lone farmer or two, try to catch him on the ground, kill him in a 5v1 scenario, and then fly around and look for another.

It's one thing to PvP while you are leveling, because you are naturally in the zone and it doesnt take you out of the way of what youre doing too much. But this is different.

You can't really make a serious stand anywhere, as with your steep death penalty, there is a strong disincentive to engage in even numbers, so you will probably forced to flee if the hordies actually gather in decent numbers.

So that just leaves you guys to go to another zone to gank more farmers. I do not see people actually maintaining this activity.

A part of the original idea was that the horde players on this server were typically of a low quality as they were the Ensidia fanboys as opposed to good players. If the fanboys have all transferred away how will this effect present and future goals?

You can not smash them, really, just annoy. In WoW you can't do any harm to other players, even for opposite faction. I play on PvP server and i hardly pay attention to it - the most harmfull thing is to kill me near ICC, stopping me from entering raid instance - but i will always be able to ress quickly and near entrance, so i will hop in anyways. Everything except raid could be delayed, or done in safe areas.

Well, you finally have a stated objective goal. That's a start. No time frame specified, though. Even if you succeed in killing every Horde 100 times (which I suspect is a big if), if it takes five years to do so, they won't even notice. Still, progress.

I doubt your kill target is going to motivate people to excel, so much as it is going to motivate a small number of people to be on all the time. At which point people who aren't willing to invest that much time are going to see that they are way behind in the rankings, too far to ever catch up, and will lose interest in the project.

@Wilson: you forget the very steep death penalty. Simply having no life doesn't help here as you gather not just kills but deaths too. Someone with a good kill/death ratio (skill) can easily outdo someone with lower one and lot of time.

Those who die more than kills/20 will actually dig themselves deeper by being online more.

"You can't really make a serious stand anywhere, as with your steep death penalty, there is a strong disincentive to engage in even numbers, so you will probably forced to flee if the hordies actually gather in decent numbers."

I agree. With a death penalty that is less steep, comparable to the ratio you'd expect in a winning bg, for instance, there would be incentive to engage in any fight where you expect to do a lot better than your enemy, rather than only fights in which a complete pwn is basically assured modulo freak occurences (like an unexpected team of non-moron 80s showing up at the last second).

That means a lot more fights that are actually fun. I'd rather do bgs and arenas than fly around with five other people one-shotting farmers, and pretty much avoiding anybody who actually PvPs even when we have numbers.

@Gnome: it's in direct contradiction of the fact that members of the guild already engage PvP combat (with similar level leveling hordies) despite the huge chance of they log to a lvl 80 alt or call a similar guildmate. Explanation:* people overestimate their chances* people prefer to take risks for fun* The risky behavior is more productive as the actual lvl 80 help is rare.

I think you overestimate the risk of PvP, believing one has to kill 20 more times than die in order to break even. The trick is that if a 5 man group kill a single enemy, that's a honorkill for each and every men.

So if you engage in a 20 vs 20 combat what ends in the wipe of the enemy and the death of 10 of our players, 10 players will have 20 more HKs while 10 will have 20-20*1 = 0 more HKs.

I do not think aiming for a number like that is a good idea, people will game the system. What is there to stop me and and another player being in cahoots and my just spending an evening ganking an alt of his to get my kills up?

A better measure could be how long we could hold one of the opposition capital city's on a regular basis.

You're not fighting a group, you're running across what will mostly be soloists farming or sometimes people trying to do their banking ah AH work if you invade a city. At no point are you actually attacking the 8-1 M&S ratio.

Gevlon, you mentioned to Eaten by a Grue that 'people grinded MUCH more boring things than [ganking farmers].' There is, however, a flaw in your logic, i think. -M&S- have grinded much more boring things than farmers. But goblins (or even half-goblins like me) don't grind. They pay other people to grind for them.

I think Eaten by a Grue is right. You're going to find it hard to keep non-M&S interested in grinding farmers for scalps. They're going to want a challenge. And they won't want their search for a challenge heavily penalised.

My idea is for you to eliminate the -20HK penalty for dying and instead increase your goal to 2,000,000 combined scalps. That will keep the epic scope of your goal intact without the crushing penalty for a single death to a skilled player. Eventually some of your gankers -will- want to fight a skilled opponent one-on-one to break up the monotony. Don't punish them for seeking a challenge.

I just looked at server population on EU-lighning's blade (Paragon's and now Esidia's server) and population is 8H:1A this will probably increase as all the fanboys start arriving to the server, so sounds like ganking sweetness too.

People who wanted to be on the Ensidea server will leave or quit playing their toons, regardless of what you do. Their reason for being there is gone.

I would think that owning Wintergrasp would be the way to cause the most pain and suffering. And it is measurable. World PVP is not terribly relevant, especially these days. How many people even notice let alone care if a few dozen extra lowbies get ganked every day? But the VOA loot pinata, and essence of Wintergrasp, is Serious Business and would be noticed. WG is by far and away the most visible impact you can have on the other side in a PvE game with trivial death consequences. I even saw 4-6 Horde in WG when the Alliance owned it. They killed the surprised singles teleporting in to buy gear or farm.

I don't know how much you would have to change gear and tactics for WG though. WG with tenacity is not PvE, but it is quite PvP either. My server isn't that unbalanced and I see shamans with over 100k health and a bear at 220k.

I read some blogger, so it must be true,that it was just one person running a fishing bot, presumably to deliberately to lag Ensidea.

To be honest, I felt like I was up for a challenge on my PvP-oirentated mage so I decided to join your project.

The Battlegroup of the server is however so lacking in BG's that I can hardly train my skills at all while levelling to 80, add the fact that I am levelling way slower on this empty realm then on my old realm I decided to switch back and at least level to 80 on my known and player heavy realm.

I might join back when I reach 80 and lose most of the benefits of my realm (including loads of morons to make me a rich goblin) but I'd also might just stay and enjoy pvp at 80.

Will see what the future brings, to be absolutely honest I don't really see the point in having lower levels in this project, they have no use until 80, so why not be an 80 only guild were people can transfer to or level their own toon (if they really are so desperate to save 20 bucks) on their own (You don't need a guild to level do you?)

@CTRL ALT Exile: I think it is a good point. There is tremendous attitude from Blizzard and the bloggers and the players to consider 1-79 somewhere between foreplay and completely irrelevant.

To make an impact, it needs to be at 80: Holding Wintergrasp or the entrance to ICC is the only thing I can think of that would be noticed. You could camp dailies, but I don't see anything as concentrated or common as Isle of Q, how much impact would camping the Hodir dailies have now?